Alcohol ads linked to underage drinkers' favorite brands

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - The brands of alcohol that
underage drinkers choose most often also happen to be the ones
advertised in magazines read most often by that age group,
according to a new U.S. study.

"We've got at least 14 long-term studies that have looked at
young people's exposure to alcohol advertising and found that
the more exposed they are the more likely that they are to start
drinking or if already drinking, to drink more," David Jernigan,
the study's senior author, told Reuters Health.

"So we try to monitor youth exposure to that advertising
because it's a risk factor for underage drinking," said
Jernigan, who is director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and
Youth (CAMY) at The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public
Health.

Young people between 18 and 20 years old are in the age
group with the highest rates of heavy episodic drinking and
alcohol use disorders, he and his colleagues write in the
Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs.

According to current self-imposed industry standards,
alcohol ads should only be placed in magazines with less than 30
percent of readers under 21 years old. But even though the
magazines follow those standards, many underage drinkers see
those ads anyway, the authors say.

To see if there are links between the ads young people see
and the alcohol brands they choose most often, the researchers
examined ads that ran in 124 national magazines during 2011.

They matched those ads to magazine readership data so they
could determine which of those ads were more likely to be seen
by 18-to-20-years-olds.

The researchers discovered that advertisements for the 25
alcohol brands most popular with underage drinkers were also
more likely to appear in the magazines read by that age group,
when compared to the 308 less popular brands.

In addition, for manufacturers of 11 of the 25 brands most
popular with underage males that age group was the most heavily
exposed to their ads. The same was true for 16 of the top 25
brands among underage females.

In all, those popular brands were five times more likely to
have 18-to-20-year-old females and nine times more likely to
have 18-to-20-year-old males in their most heavily exposed
audience, compared with all other brands.

The authors say it's unlikely this exposure is the
accidental result of "spillover" advertising aimed at legal age
drinkers.

The study didn't examine the drinking behaviors of magazine
readers and does not prove that young people choose these brands
because of advertising, they caution.

"It's striking that we looked at the top 25 brands among
males and the top 25 among females and 308 other brands managed
to reach the legal aged audience more effectively than the
underage audience," Jernigan said.

"We can't make a causal arrow 'cause this is a one point in
time study, but nonetheless it's very striking," he said.

Jernigan said it's important for parents to know that kids
are seeing a lot of alcohol advertising and they see different
ads than older people see. By the same token, he added, the ads
young people see most don't reach the other age groups as
effectively so parents are much less likely to see them.

"We sometimes call this advertising that flies under the
parental radar," he said.

But the findings show it's possible to aim the advertising
in a way that it doesn't reach underage kids, he added.

"It is possible," Jernigan said. "These brands ought to be
able to do it."

SOURCE: http://bit.ly/1kBa8XH The Journal of Studies on
Alcohol and Drugs, July 2014.